What have you done to your wagon lately? (Let's keep the thread going!)

78 ford country squire . I had put in a Viper alarm last year and got all to work except for the locks. Ford uses a flip ground system to lock and unlock the doors. I took the top of the dash apart and found the lock wires. When I put 12 volts to the wire which had power it just sparked and trip the relay. According to the wire diagram of the car it should of worked. My son posted on 12 volt .com.[ A GREAT SOURCE] and they felt we cut the wires in the wrong place. The place to cut the wires was in the passenger door between the door lock switch and the lock actuator. I had to cut the both wires and use 2 relays to get it to work. The rt door lock switch is a slave to the driver side and everything goes through it. I hope I explained it correctly

 

Yeah, I pretty much understood. It's good your son found a solution online. You have pics for your CS?

 

I went out and got a polishing kit with enough in there to do two headlights. I spent hours trying to undull the one. But, am sceptical about it getting through inspection. I also removed the engine trim. Nothing looks ballsy, under there. It all looks more like refinery plumbing. Maybe, that's why they covered it all:





Before and after. I'll have to park it in front of a wall, at night, to see if there's a great difference:

 

It's better; go buy a higher-intensity bulb for it.

 

It's better but it's not a large difference.

 

I think the difference is quite impressive.
It's the little details that make a car stand out from all of the other hum-drum vehicles to be seen at any given time.

 

It's those details which worry me, when I carefully watch the inspector's thumb, to see if it'll point up or down. I pulled up into a parking space which had a wall in front of it, last evening. As soon as it got dark, I went out to see if there was any major difference between beam patterns. Unfortunately for me, ivy was growing on the side of the wall where my right hand beam was projecting. I could still see the beam division, projected by the left hand beam, which might not have been visible before the polish job. The car has had its last inspection only two years ago. I can't imagine the headlight suddenly dulling out that bad, since then, and I have no records of the right hand lamp having gotten replaced. Since I just recently found out that they even make these from plastic, I'm not sure as to if it's possible for one of these to look brand new, after 19 years of service. In a worse case scenario, I might have to go get a new headlight which begins at 130€.
Today, it's not going to be the fun part. I'm driving it up on ramps and will see about removing the entire exhaust system, to get at the soot filter. Just like how it looks under the hood, the floor pan looks like it's stamped around the exhaust and not the other way around like it used to be on vintage American cars. If it looks feasable, I'll get it apart and then take the filter to the quarter car wash, in order to try blasting the soot out of there

 

Try this, I did it on much worse yellow headlights on a 2000 Caravan and it cleared them up. However, I will say it may not last as long as ChrisFix thought it would, I also used this on most of my Suburban headlights and they're not as bad as they were but they're still a little yellow now these 2 years later; the tail lights, however, still look ruby red now when before they looked dull:

 

I only got 5000 grit wetsand paper and polishing wax which was obviously not sufficient for heavy duty use. The clearcoat came in the form of a clearcoat-soaked towel of which I was supposed to rub the lamp with. Taking up to half an hour to dry, there was some debris stuck to the lamp, the next day

 

I make lamps 5-6 days a week ( design and manufacture of auto lighting systems), what I do when the uv hardcoat comes off is to just keep the lamp polished and waxed to help prevent the polycarbonate lens from degrading ( it's all I ever did with the Magnum once the uv peeled), but when the lens is already clouding/ yellowing is start with 320 wet/dry paper and wet sand until the lens is fairly clear then switch to 400 grit to remove the 320 scratches, then on to 600 and finally polish/wax or use a rattle can clear coat and let it cure over night. But I would still keep the lenses waxed to preserve them.

 

A couple days ago I made a bracket for my strecher in my 1966 town and country. I also mounted a mocom radio. Tomorrow or the next day I'm going to fix my breaks

 

Does the newer headlight look 19 years old? If not possible, then it was indeed replaced:

 

I changed most of the ATF and the filter and then the brand new gasket didn't stop a small leak near the rear end of the pan. Ha ha ha, now I have to take the pan off again and put the old gasket on. Measure how thick the new gasket is if you're changing brands.

 

I had been wanting to buy a backup camera for a while, especially since the wagon is my daily driver, and we have small kids. I didn't want to mess with a wireless camera, so I opted for a wired one. I really didn't want to have a screen mounted on the windshield, and didn't want to put any holes in my trim, so I bought a rearview mirror that has a screen in it, and has the auto-dimming feature.

Since I was going to have to take the interior trim off to get the headliner down to install the wires, I decided I would go ahead and hard-wire my dash cam at the same time.

And, since everything would be taken apart, I decided it would be the best time to upgrade my interior lighting. I was tired of only having the one dome light in the middle of the car, and never being able to see the interior. Even with the LED bulb I put in there, it just wasn't enough.

So, I went to the junkyard and pulled four tan-colored door lights out of some Cadillac cars, and went on Ebay to buy a dome light to match the one I had.

After installing the four door lights above each door, I installed the second dome light pointed toward the rear door above the flip-up third row. With all new matching LED bulbs in the lights, I now have an interior that beautifully illuminated when the doors open!